Blanche K. Bruce

Blanche Kelso Bruce was born into slavery on the first of March 1841, in Prince Edward County, Virginia, near Farmville. He took his early education from a private tutor hired to educate his enslaver's son — an arrangement extended to the young Bruce, who learned alongside the master's own boy. As the Civil War opened, Bruce left for the free soil of Kansas and Missouri, seizing his liberty and beginning a life of study and teaching.

After emancipation, Bruce made his way to Mississippi, where in 1869 he settled in the fertile Delta country. There he prospered as a planter and rose swiftly through public office — serving as sergeant-at-arms of the state senate, tax assessor, sheriff, and county superintendent of education. His industry and steadiness of character won him wide respect among Black and white citizens alike during the hopeful years of Reconstruction.

In 1874 the Mississippi legislature elected him to the United States Senate. Taking his seat in 1875, Bruce became the second African American to serve in that chamber and the first to serve a full six-year term. On the fourteenth of February 1879, he presided over the Senate — the first African American ever to hold the gavel of that body.

After his term, Bruce remained in public life, appointed Register of the Treasury and later Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, his signature carried on the nation's currency. He died in Washington on the seventeenth of March 1898. We honor Blanche Kelso Bruce, who rose from bondage to the highest councils of the Republic and would not let the world forget that a free man's dignity is his own to claim.